Architecture

How much influence does fundraising for a president buy you? Apparently, not much. In September 2012, Frank Gehry joined Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Claes Oldenburg, and other prominent “Artists for Obama” in contributing to a portfolio that was presented to big donors and is estimated to have raised $4.2 million for the president’s re-election campaign. This week the White House announced the appointment of the president’s new representative on the commission that is overseeing the design and construction of the planned Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., which is being designed by Gehry The appointee is Bruce Cole,

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A recent article in the New York Times points out the youth and inexperience of many teachers in today’s charter schools. In a related Slate piece, Sarah Mosle observes of her three years as a young Teach for America grade school teacher: “I was single, childless, and clueless about even the most basic aspects of child-rearing. My students’ parents seemed like creatures from another planet, remote and distant from the job I thought I was doing. To the extent I understood family dynamics, it was solely from the perspective of the teenager I’d been just a few years before.” There is a parallel here with teaching architecture.

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Michael Kimmelman in a New York Times article on a new Italian winery near Florence, identifies the architect as Archea. There is no Architetto Archea, it’s a made-up name. While most architecture firms continue to be named John Doe Associates, the use of invented names is increasingly common. There are the mega-practices Aecom and Aedas, the mainstream Ennead (originally Polshek Partnership), cutting-edge SHoP, and the recently disbanded Office dA. Some of the made-up names involve arcane wordplay–Coop Himmelb(l)au, Mecanoo, Asymptote, Arch-Tectonics–and some seem calculated simply to grab our attention, like the Danish firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group),

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Architectural curricula have changed in the last several decades. First, they are shorter. Architecture, since it concerns creativity, takes time. The original course of study at the École des Beaux-Arts recognized this; you simply kept at it until you were considered ready to leave. Modern architecture programs used to be five or six years. Since they devoted  time to general subjects, this usually meant about four years of intensive architecture study. In the 1970s, most universities followed Harvard’s lead and made a three-year Master the professional degree. The problem was that a BA degree didn’t really prepare students for a career in architecture,

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I came across a term new to me in an architectural magazine today. The writer was speculating about whether Jeff Bezos would have an influence on the design of the new headquarters of the Washington Post. “One question is whether the newspaper’s new owner wants a statement building,” he wrote. A statement building! It struck me as a sad commentary on the present state of architecture that what at one time would have been called simply good design had now been elevated to the status of a “statement.” And a statement of what?

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Guy Horton wrote an article recently in ArchDaily on starchitects. He included a number of comments by various architecture critics and observers (including your truly). I was struck that many of my colleagues called for “retiring” the term–whatever that means–as if it were primarily about semantics. It’s not, it’s primarily about money. Just as certain Hollywood actors can make a film script into a bankable movie, certain architects can add monetary value to a project (with donors, buyers, the general public). That is why the acting star and the designing star get paid more.

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